SARAH WATERS
	Sarah Waters was born in Neyland, Pembrokeshire in 1966, and went to school locally before going to university in Canterbury (she has a PhD in English Literature). She now lives in South London.

Her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, won a 1999 Betty Trask Award and was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. She was inspired to write it while working on her PhD thesis on lesbian historical fiction that underlined the inadequacies and potential of the contemporary lesbian historical genre. As part of her research, she read a fair amount of nineteenth-century pornography and dictionaries of slang and vulgar words: 'tipping the velvet' is Victorian slang for cunnilingus.

Tipping the Velvet was published in February 1998 and was described by Emma Donoghue as 'A lesbian Rake's Progress which will transport you to the lush textures and emotional ambiguities of 1890s London a delightful novel which sets a new standard for lesbian historical fiction', while the Daily Telegraph declared 'This could be the most important debut of its kind since that of Jeanette Winterson'. It was adapted by Andrew Davies for BBC drama in 2002

Sarah Waters' second novel, Affinity, was published in May 1999. Margaret Atwood declared 'I did enjoy it fooled me!' and A N Wilson wrote 'This is such a brilliant writer that her readers would believe anything she told them' while in the Guardian, Giles Foden predicted Affinity to be 'the very type of book which may turn out to be the signature of late 20th- century fiction in Britain'. For Affinity, Sarah was awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, as well being runner up for the Welsh Book of the Year Award, all in 2000. Affinity has also been shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday / John Llewelyn Rhys Prize.

Her third novel, Fingersmith, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize 2002 and for the Man Booker Prize 2002. It won the CWA Historical Dagger prize for historical crime fiction and was picked more than any other novel as a Book of the Year 2002.

In January 2003, Sarah Waters was named as one of Granta's twenty Best of Young British Writers. She is recipient of the South Bank Award for Literature 2003 and was named Author of the Year at the 2003 British Book Awards.